Every now and again, there’s a cool little app that comes-along, and makes life easier.
Let me introduce, “Affixa.”
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Chris Wood in the UK (Affixa’s developer) over the past months, and now that the beta is done, and the product is in release, I have to rave.
Download Affixa now!
Affixa lets you make your web-based email application your system’s default email client (right-click a file, and send using Gmail, or Yahoo…).
I find it hard to believe that I’m the first person to notice this (and I follow the blogosphere pretty closely), but when I fired-up Gmail this morning, and went to add a contact, I found a subtle (but welcome) improvement.
It used to be that the contact fields, “Title,” and “Company” were buried down in the “More Information” section.
Now, they’re more conveniently located beneath the name:
When a business looks at moving its IT functions “into the cloud,” there are some obvious cost savings (no more servers to maintain, no more expensive software to license, and so forth), but I still run into people who wonder if their operations will be as reliable as the proprietary systems they’re giving-up.
Over at the Official Google Blog, they explain just how fanatical they are about uptime, pointing-out, “We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged.”
And after having moved more than a million businesses off of expensive, in-house servers, and onto the cloud, that attention to detail has paid-off, with greater than 99.9% reliability.
How does that compare with the old, proprietary technologies?
For months, I’ve been preaching to clients about the benefits of using Google Apps for Your Domain, not the least of which is the Gmail system (which, incidentally, has about the best anti-spam system available).
It’s good to see that I’m not alone. I spotted a good endorsement of the mail component on ReadWriteWeb this morning.